NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Department for Technology, Culture and Society, and the 370 Jay Project held a discussion on diplomacy in the series on Co-Opting AI. Featuring Barry O’Sullivan, Maroussia Lévesque, Thomas Streinz, and Mona Sloane in conversation, this event examined how AI changes diplomacy.
How does the global race for leadership in AI innovation change the global political landscape? In what ways does AI affect questions around diplomacy and human rights? What are the new challenges for conversations about AI regulation in diplomacy? How does the concentration of power in just a few global tech companies affect diplomatic relations? The panelists drew on their expertise on AI, governance, regulation, human rights, and innovation policy to discuss these questions.
Maroussia Lévesque is an attorney and researcher with a background in interactive media. Prior to graduate studies at Harvard Law School, she was a senior policy analyst at Global Affairs Canada focusing on artificial intelligence. She drafted the Department’s AI foreign policy strategy, and led inter-department and multistakeholder consultations to integrate the multiple dimensions of AI into a coherent policy position. NeurIPS featured her work in the IEEE working group on the algorithmic bias. She published on IP considerations in stem cell research, on extraordinary rendition and the war on terror, as well as on the role of mobile platforms in the public sphere. She also gives digital privacy and algorithmic accountability workshops. She tweets at @_m_a_r_o_u.
Professor Barry O’Sullivan is an award-winning academic working in the fields of artificial intelligence, constraint programming, operations research, ethics, and public policy for AI and data analytics. He holds the Chair of Constraint Programming in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork. He served as Head of Department, Computer Science, from 2012-2015. He is the founding Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at UCC, and a Principal Investigator at the Confirm Centre for Smart Manufacturing based at the University of Limerick. He is an Adjunct Professor at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. In June 2018, Professor O’Sullivan was appointed to the European Commission High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence of which he is a vice-chair, specifically chairing its working group on Investment and Policy. He is an advisor to the Computational Sustainability Network, a network of 13 universities in the US, led by Cornell University and involving Princeton, Stanford, CMU, Georgia Tech, and many others. Professor O’Sullivan is a Fellow and President of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EurAI), one of the world’s largest AI associations with over 4500 members in over 30 countries. Professor O’Sullivan was President of the International Association for Constraint Programming from 2007-2012. Professor O’Sullivan has been involved in winning over €250 million in research funding, of which approximately €40 million has directly supported his research activities at UCC. He runs his own AI consulting firm, AI Machina, and tweets at @BarryOSullivan.
Thomas Streinz is the Executive Director of Guarini Global Law & Tech, Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU Law, and Fellow at the Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ). He works on Internet governance (ICANN), regulation of the global data economy, global law and technology, and global digital governance. He teaches the Guarini Colloquium: International Law of Global Digital Corporations (with Benedict Kingsbury and Joseph H. H. Weiler), the Global Tech Law: Selected Topic Seminar, and a new course on Global Data Law (with Angelina Fisher and Benedict Kingsbury) at NYU Law.
Mona Sloane is a sociologist working on inequality in the context of AI design and policy. At IPK, Mona founded and convenes the Co-Opting AI series, and she also curates the Co-Opting AI section on Public Books. She is a Fellow with NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology and with the GovLab. She also teaches at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. Mona received her PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has completed fellowships at UC Berkeley and the University of Cape Town. She tweets at @mona_sloane.
This event was sponsored by Tandon’s Department for Technology, Culture and Society, and the 370 Jay Project at NYU. The Co-Opting AI series is convened by Mona Sloane.
